Nothing about the way Sarah is holding her phone suggests she is about to gamble €9,002 on a whim, but that is exactly what is happening in this Sandymount kitchen. She is tracing the edges of a grease stain on a Lidl receipt, her thumb hovering over the “call” icon for a man named Mick.
She has never met Mick. She knows, however, through the filtered gossip of a residents’ WhatsApp group, that Mick’s dog is named Buster and that he “cleans up after himself.” These two facts, utterly irrelevant to the structural integrity of a sub-base, are currently outweighing of frantic Google searches.
We hire people we’d like to have a pint with. I spent this morning peeling an orange in one single, continuous spiral-a task that requires a quiet mind and a refusal to rush-and it occurred to me that most homeowners approach a major renovation with the exact opposite energy.
They are frantic, they are searching for “the one,” and they are asking all the wrong questions. They ask about insurance. They ask about warranties. They ask for references.
These are not selection questions; they are screening questions.